Episode 2

Nathan Holbert:

Welcome to Pop And Play, the podcast all about play in its many silly, serious, and powerful forms. I'm Nathan Holbert.

 

Haeny Yoon:

And I'm Haeny Yoon. In this season, we've been talking to activists, scholars, educators, parents, and children about play, but in particular, the benefits, limitations, and the creative possibilities of young people's medium making and their participation.

 

Nathan Holbert:

Yeah, that's right. And today we are talking with two of our favorites. We're talking with Henry Jenkins, Provost Professor of Communication, Journalism, Cinematic Arts and Education at the University of Southern California, and our very own Ioana Literat, Associate Professor and Co-Director of the Communication, Media, and Learning Technologies Design program at Teachers College. I'm very excited to talk with both of these experts who are-

 

Haeny Yoon:

I am too, chomping at the bit.

 

Nathan Holbert:

Let's start this conversation by talking about fan communities. I'm specifically interested, Haeny, in your fandom. I know you're a Swiftie, but I'm curious what other fandoms you've explored.

 

Haeny Yoon:

I don't know if I would consider myself a hardcore fan of anything. I just dabble. I'm obviously a Swiftie, but that is...

 

Nathan Holbert:

Obviously.

 

Haeny Yoon:

Obviously, yes. And that, I feel like that fandom actually came from moments in my life where I got my heart broken and was very ticked off at people.

 

Nathan Holbert:

Oh.

 

Haeny Yoon:

I know. So I had to cry in my room and it's good crying music. Crying in my room, crying in the car, crying everywhere, crying while I'm running. Good songs to cry to. But I was thinking more of the question of where do I get information now in these fan cultures? And right now it's from TikTok and these algorithms that feed me things. And so lately I've been watching the Golden Bachelorette, and so now I get all of these TikToks from Bachelor Nation basically. And Bachelor Nation is a fandom community that actually mobilizes a lot of stuff. It's interesting to me because it's not just a breakdown of what happened in the episodes or skip this because it's a spoiler alert kind of thing, but they just really go hard after some people.

 

Nathan Holbert:

Oh, wow.

 

Haeny Yoon:

And they bring in the politics of race and gender and all of these things. So it can be an interesting fan community, as well as sometimes toxic. I will say that as well.

 

Nathan Holbert:

So TikTok is defining your fan communities for you.

 

Haeny Yoon:

It is. Yeah, it is.

 

Nathan Holbert:

The algorithm is.

 

Haeny Yoon:

It's telling me what I should be interested in right now.

 

Nathan Holbert:

It's like, you're into this. Oh, okay.

 

Haeny Yoon:

For a little while, I was only interested in Travis and Taylor being seen at Chiefs games. And then for a while it was like, I'm a fan of Jason Kelce and Travis on New Heights.

 

Nathan Holbert:

Are you a fan or is the algorithm just convincing you you're a fan? Or is that the same thing?

 

Haeny Yoon:

I don't know, but it's getting scary. Very dark and dystopian.

 

Nathan Holbert:

That is dystopian. I was going to say it, but I'm glad you did.

 

Haeny Yoon:

Yes. How about you? Tell me about your fan community?

 

Nathan Holbert:

Well, I don't use TikTok, so I haven't been programmed yet to become a fan of anything based upon TikTok. I've been certainly programmed to become a fan based upon just being a white boy, living in certain places in the world. And so things like Star Wars. I'm actually wearing...

 

Haeny Yoon:

Oh, nice.

 

Nathan Holbert:

A Star Wars shirt.

 

Haeny Yoon:

A Star Wars shirt.

 

Nathan Holbert:

It was an intentional choice, today.

 

Haeny Yoon:

Yes. Excellent,

 

Nathan Holbert:

For the listener. Big fan of Star Wars over the years. I would say though that the community that I found myself becoming the nerdiest was with Tolkien. I'm not at Stephen Colbert levels of knowledge and nerdiness. But I definitely found myself at one point, I think I was in college or something, the Lord of the Rings movies had just come out. The first one had just come out. I saw it with my friends. And after it was over, we were standing around in the lobby talking about what we had just seen. And I, two or three times, well actually, well actually the group...

 

Haeny Yoon:

Oh, you're one of those.

 

Nathan Holbert:

And I was like, "Oh no, I'm one of those. I know too much and I'm too precious about it. This is bad." And so I tried to stop being that, but that's definitely a community that I've gone deep with.

 

Haeny Yoon:

Yeah. Yeah. I think that points to how there's what people think of frivolity to some of these fan cultures, that it's frivolous nonsense or whatever, but it's also brings you a lot of joy and contentment, but then also as part of your identity making and who you want to be in the world.

 

Nathan Holbert:

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

 

Haeny Yoon:

And so I think it has a lot. And then you find affinities.

 

Nathan Holbert:

Well, that's the thing about fandoms, is that they create these spaces for communities. You mentioned the word affinities. I was thinking, I went to Comic-Con recently and I was taking my kids. And just as a quick story about fandom, my kids both dressed up as characters from this specific video game called Undertale. And what was cool about this is at Comic-Con we saw very few people dressed as characters from this game.

But we saw two or three kids that were. And when my kids, when Emerson or Maisie spotted this other person, or when that other person spotted one of them, there was this moment of recognition, of just absolute delight and connection. And they would run to each other and be like, "Oh my God, that's so cool. Your costume is amazing." And they would, "Take a picture, take a picture." And they would get really, really excited about the possibilities of this new relationship that was fleeting, of course, but joined just because of this fandom over this one particular game. I think that's a really, really cool feature and quality of these fandoms.

 

Haeny Yoon:

So true. It's what Lauren Berlant calls intimate publics. The fact that these communities exist in the public and out there, and that somehow these strangers can come together and share this intimacy or bond because of this thing. I think it's that those communities do a lot for people.

So then I was thinking about an example about how you could actually use play and fun and something that you think is nonsense into something that could also be about political expression. So I remember this article I read by Anandini Dar, and she talked about South Asian kids who lived in Queens, I think, Jackson Heights. It was post-911. There was all this difficulty and maybe possible danger and risk of being a brown kid in the streets because of what people would say to you that become racist, that can become very dangerous maybe, and maybe treacherous.

And so their parents were telling them, be as invisible as possible. Don't be out there. And just go there, come back here. And they weren't really supposed to be out on the streets. And they decided to do the exact opposite of that and be as visible as possible. So this is like 2016 or '19 or something. And so they organized a flash mob wearing lungis, which were their traditional dress. And basically the idea was to take something that was so traditional and put it on their bodies and re-appropriate it into something that's playful and contemporary, and then do a flash mob about it so that everybody in the streets can see how visible you are.

I just love that as a really creative way of thinking about political expression, that it doesn't always have to be about petitions or organizing a march or doing this or doing that, but that there's ways to think about creative and imaginative ways to be out there because of media.

 

Nathan Holbert:

That's a great segue way to our guests to talk a little bit more about the ways in which people organize, the ways in which the internet and social media can become part of that process, and the ways in which fans and fandom communities can engage in participation out in the world. Let's go to it.

 

Haeny Yoon:

Welcome to another episode of Pop and Play. We have two very illustrious guests, two people that I am major fans of. First we have Henry Jenkins, who is Provost Professor of Communication Journalism, Cinematic Arts and Education at the University of Southern California. He's the author of 20 books on media and pop culture, a lot of which I've actually read. I'm not doing that just to get score points, but I'm serious. Including my personal favorites, oldies but goodies, Hop On Pop, the wild climax, and Children's Culture Reader, all of which were introduced to me by my advisor, Ann Dyson, who always recommends really good books. And textual poachers, he talks about being an ACA fan, and I thought that I would definitely mention that it's the idea of the part fan, part academic, which accurately defines I think all of us in this room. We would be remiss though if we didn't shout out my personal fave, which is going bonkers about Pee-wee's Playhouse, which I have referenced many times on this show. Henry is also the co-host of How Do You Like It So Far, a podcast about pop culture. So welcome Henry.

 

Henry Jenkins:

Delighted to be here.

 

Haeny Yoon:

Also, we have Dr. Ioana Literat, who is a longtime friend of the pod, associate professor and co-director of the Communication Media and Learning Technologies and Design program at Teacher's college.

 

Nathan Holbert:

Nailed it.

 

Haeny Yoon:

Nailed it. One of the directors of MASCLab as well as MASC, which is the media and social change lab, sorry, where a lot of really cool work among about multimodal and creative ideas circulate and come around. She's the author of a new book entitled Not Your Parents' Politics. It's about the focus of a lot of her research, which is on how young people develop their political and civic participation and identities online.

She is the host of the formerly known Trashy Awards, which is still available on TikTok, if you'd like to know, and the upcoming star of a new spin-off series in the works, which involves balloons and pop. More to come. She was mentored under Henry Jenkins at USC. So they share an obvious interest, which you probably can tell, in how media mobilizes, youth civic identities and lowers barriers to participation and contribution. Welcome, Ioana.

 

Ioana Literat:

Thank you. It's great to be here.

 

Haeny Yoon:

Great. So we brought them together because obviously we're talking about media, we're talking about youth media and the creativity that happens when children and young people come together and make spaces of creativity and play around media and online identity. So we thought, who is better to do this than our two esteemed colleagues that are right before us. Okay.

 

Nathan Holbert:

Yeah. We'd like to start, before we dive into the deep conversations here about media and about media making. We always like to start with a bit of a game to loosen us up and to get us thinking about some of the ideas here. And so I've come up with a brief game for us to play. And the idea will be that I'm going to give you a short scenario. Maybe it's an emergency situation you're finding yourself in. Maybe it's just a space that you're occupying. And I want you to let me know which fan community you would like to help you out of this bind or be with you as you occupy this space. Emergency situation, I'll give you a multiple choice list of the fan community you want to mobilize to help you out. And as always, feel free to choose an other option, a fan community that I haven't listed here for your answer. Okay. Does that sound good?

 

Ioana Literat:

Great.

 

Nathan Holbert:

Okay, so we'll start easy here. You're late to apply for a passport, but you have plans to leave the country in three days. Which fan community do you get to help you get that passport? Or if you'd rather, which fan community can help sneak you out of the country and back in again? Do you call the Trekkies, the BTS ARMY, the Colombophiles, or some other fan community? Who's going to help you out of this bind with a passport?

 

Henry Jenkins:

You can't beat the BTS ARMY. They are so strong, so skilled at manipulating computers and fully capable of taking you anywhere you want to go.

 

Haeny Yoon:

I totally agree.

 

Henry Jenkins:

I think the Colombophiles would always have one more thing.

 

Nathan Holbert:

You never get it done.

 

Henry Jenkins:

Never get the job done.

 

Haeny Yoon:

I totally agree. BTS ARMY will always get you there.

 

Nathan Holbert:

Excellent answer. Yeah. Ioana, what do you think? Henry's laid out all the different states here.

 

Ioana Literat:

Yes, but I will go with other and a bit of an active foreshadowing my fandoms, which if you've watch the Trashys you know what they are. I will choose the 90-Day Fiancee fan community. We call ourselves on Reddit The Users because of the frequent accusations of using people for immigration visas. But in this case, I think even beyond their determination and collective intelligence and all that, they know a lot about immigration, about greasing palms, about diplomacy, formal and informal. So definitely I'll go with 90-Day Fiancee and probably I'll find reasons to use those for every single situation.

 

Haeny Yoon:

I love that.

 

Nathan Holbert:

I like that you've chosen a community that has the specific knowledge very necessary for this particular moment. We'll see.

 

Ioana Literat:

Yes. Not just because you liked them, but they're useful.

 

Nathan Holbert:

They're well-suited for this challenge. Perfect. Okay, great. So let's go to another scenario. So this time you've gotten stuck in an elevator and you are likely to be there for a while. So which fan community do you hope is with you? Maybe this fan community is sitting with you in the elevator, passing the time, or maybe they're actually going to help save the day. So your options are the Swifties, the Bunheads, which I had to explain to Haeny. These are people who are really into Little House On The Prairie.

 

Haeny Yoon:

Ioana's also not heard about this.

 

Ioana Literat:

Now I'm shaking my head.

 

Nathan Holbert:

Well, sorry. The Tolkien Nerds or the Metalheads. Which of these fan communities is going to be most helpful in this situation?

 

Henry Jenkins:

You want to go first, Ioana? I went first last time.

 

Haeny Yoon:

Yeah, go ahead, Ioana. Tell us why the Users going to help you in this elevator.

 

Ioana Literat:

Okay. I'll tell you why. One, obviously we could talk about show lore forever and help pass the time. That's going to be the best way to pass it. What will I talk about to the Swifties and the Bunheads? No, I have nothing to talk. Sorry.

 

Haeny Yoon:

You can do your own three-hour Eras tour in the elevator.

 

Ioana Literat:

No, and then I also feel like the Swifties will just be pulling... Sorry, this is going to sound judgmental, but I'm going to say it anyway. They're just going to be streaming, TikToking, oh my God, guys, I'm stuck in an elevator. Meanwhile, the Users don't care about online clout.

 

Haeny Yoon:

I take offense to that. Being a Swiftie.

 

Nathan Holbert:

I think it was targeted at you. So you should take offense. Henry, what do you think?

 

Henry Jenkins:

Well, if I'm looking for good conversations, I'd love to mix up the Good Omens fans and the Godzilla fans because those are both things I'm really into right now.

 

Nathan Holbert:

Wow.

 

Ioana Literat:

You can mix them.

 

Henry Jenkins:

Having a conversation between those two groups would be especially interesting in passing the time.

 

Haeny Yoon:

I love that.

 

Nathan Holbert:

Wow, that's an interesting combo. And I like that you've opened up the space of possibilities here to mix fandoms. That's good.

 

Haeny Yoon:

Intersectional fandoms.

 

Nathan Holbert:

Fantastic. Well, thank you guys for playing that game with us. Yeah, I think it was a nice way for us to start talking about, honestly, one of the hard parts for this game was thinking of the wide range of fan communities that are out there. I only know a limited slice of the world here, and so it was fun to try to pull in other communities that I was less aware of. And you guys even pulled in more than that, so that was fantastic.

 

Haeny Yoon:

Yeah. So this is a good lead-in because we wanted to start off this conversation at a personal level about your own fandoms and then branch out a little bit to the bigger fandoms and what it means for young people, what it means for the future and scope of media. We want to begin with thinking about the spaces and communities that you participate in. I think we already know what Ioana's fandom community is. Tell us though how and why you became involved and why you chose that specific community, how you participate, and what it does for you.

 

Nathan Holbert:

Yeah. Do you want to start since see we already know you're a User?

 

Ioana Literat:

Sure. The mystery is all gone. Yeah, but I think something that you might not know about me is that I'm actually any TV show I watch, I will join that subreddit. And what I love about it is that it feels like I'm in community with thousands of witty, like-minded commentators. If you know me, you also know that I'm the person that likes to comment. I'm also the person that gets shushed. Often. I'm thinking about you, Haeny.

 

Haeny Yoon:

You're a commenter during the watch.

 

Ioana Literat:

Yes.

 

Haeny Yoon:

Not just on Twitter, subreddits.

 

Ioana Literat:

No, during. Yeah. And so this way I have the flexibility of commenting during, commenting afterwards, commenting synchronously, asynchronously. And I really feel that sense of like-mindedness. I think, in terms of modality, the text-only mode of Reddit or text-oriented, text-primary mode of Reddit really helps with that like-mindedness. It helps me.

 

Haeny Yoon:

Oh, so you don't like the visual or the audio stuff?

 

Ioana Literat:

No, I don't want to see your face. I don't want to see your room.

 

Nathan Holbert:

Good to know.

 

Ioana Literat:

I don't want to see the glare of your ring light in your pupils. Because I want to imagine that you're just like me. And so I think that text helps me.

 

Nathan Holbert:

There's a lot to unpack there. We'll have to get back to that though.

 

Haeny Yoon:

Okay. And I'll see my standbys. So basically your community is subreddits and watching, maybe a watching community. It's more like TV as participatory culture.

 

Ioana Literat:

And something else that I love about Reddit is that it's a mix. My TV subreddits are right there in my feed with my parenting and my academic and my natures lit, and all the other communities that I subscribe to on Reddit. I contain multitudes, and I like that.

 

Haeny Yoon:

Nice. I appreciate that. How about you, Henry?

 

Henry Jenkins:

Boy, we're trying to quickly summarize more than 50 years of involvement in fandom in one response. First thing I'd say is that I'm very polyamorous as a fan. I don't stick to one fandom. I want them all and I want them close and around me. I just want to snuggle in with my fandoms. But my first fandom was Batman 66. I was eight years old. I was obviously a cosplayer from the very beginning because my mother made me a Batman costume, looting a batarang and a utility belt. We just romp around the neighborhood having fake fights with my friends and shouting pow, bang and all that stuff. And then I became a famous monster fan, and we made models. So there was a bit of a making thing in it. I've been asked to play a Klingon more than once in my career, including on the set of the Star Trek, the first of the new Star Trek movies.

 

Nathan Holbert:

Oh, wow.

 

Haeny Yoon:

What? Really?

 

Henry Jenkins:

They cut that out.

 

Haeny Yoon:

Oh, no.

 

Henry Jenkins:

But that sequence was cut, but if you go to the DVD extras, you can see a silhouette of a Klingon on a balcony. And that Klingon happened to be me.

 

Haeny Yoon:

Wow.

 

Nathan Holbert:

That's cool.

 

Haeny Yoon:

That's the ultimate of fandom.

 

Henry Jenkins:

So I'm not a card-carrying, canonical Klingon in the Star Trek universe. It was a lot of fun. So for what am I fan of today? Mostly, I'm lately gotten really interested in fandom in China because spent the last two summers in China doing fieldwork. And I would sum it up as my fascination with POP MART toys, that there's such interesting toys from China. We have a couple of stores in the US now, and I actually saw a POP MART machine in a random mall yesterday. So they're coming to invade us.

 

Haeny Yoon:

Sorry. What is a POP MART machine?

 

Henry Jenkins:

This is not a POP MART version, but this is Lotso Bear who's a Disney character, but one that we tend not to merchandise here, but rather folks in China have discovered him and feel a strong attachment to him. He's actually the villain in Toy Story 3. The Chinese feel like he became a villain because he was shy and misunderstood. And therefore like the Chinese. And so they're defenders of Lotso Bear.

 

Haeny Yoon:

It's like little miniature toys that, are they rubber or are they soft?

 

Henry Jenkins:

They're vinyl, I think. This one has some fur attached to it.

 

Haeny Yoon:

They look like Care Bears.

 

Henry Jenkins:

So anyway, I've fallen in a rabbit hole fascination. In doll practices and dolls in China and Korea, and that's probably my most intense fan object at the moment.

 

Haeny Yoon:

Wow, that's very cool.

 

Nathan Holbert:

That is cool. One of the things I've been thinking about as we've been planning and researching for this episode and other activities we're doing across campus around play and fan communities is the difference between fan communities when you're an adult and the difference between fan communities when you're a kid. And one thing that seems clear to me is that fan communities are really intergenerational in a lot of ways. Are you interested at all in fan communities as they pertain to really young kids? Or are you mostly interested in them as adult communities and adult spaces? I'm curious if either of you have some thoughts on that.

 

Henry Jenkins:

It's an interesting topic.

 

Ioana Literat:

Yeah.

 

Henry Jenkins:

I've done lots with children, but I think you could say the Pee-wee's Place, Ioana, going bonkers is a good example of looking at fan communities of children. And the first thing you see is they don't need permission to play, adults do. So the ways in which I felt much more assured when you said you have to play this game. You gave me permission. Then if I could choose to play the game, because then all of your social anxieties come into play. And so that's one big difference is, fandom is a space for adult play, which sets it apart from a lot of other organizations and subcultures and so forth.

 

Haeny Yoon:

Yeah, I think your question, Nathan, is making me think about how fandoms, I think we sometimes assume that they're delineated by age. But sometimes these fandoms or affinities are because of other things. So I'm thinking about Blackpink, the K-pop group, so their fans are called Blinks. And I feel like when I watch people be interested in Blackpink, it's very much younger, not just Asian girls, but there's a fandom around it. But then I think what makes me attracted to that is the cultural affinity and the aspect of it that resonates with my own background and development. So I think there's something. And it reminds me of old school K-pop from the '90s. I like this a lot. And you'd think that Swifties. That I'm not doing it just to get in with kids, I like it myself.

 

Ioana Literat:

But I think it's interesting because also a culture of fandom, I feel like, has to be cultivated in one's life and in one's growing up. And I think I find it so beautiful how Henry is talking about your beginnings into fandom and then your pathways into fandom and the Batman costume and your practices. Thinking back in my life, I can't think of anything like that. And I wonder if it's because the media, the specific media environment and political conditions that we had in Romania growing up, that there was just not a lot of choice where you could, I think there's a very specific act of choosing of affiliation in fandom. And we didn't have that. And I think that's really interesting in how I think about fandom now that I really only came into fandom in my young adulthood.

 

Haeny Yoon:

Do you think that your background growing up has influenced why you're studying the things that you do? So how does it connect to youth civic participation and political expression? Because what I heard you say is that your background in these very oppressive political systems.

 

Ioana Literat:

Yeah, for sure.

 

Haeny Yoon:

Informed how you're thinking about the world.

 

Ioana Literat:

That's how I started my tenure statement. Because I don't know, it was really, I think going out for tenure and having to think about your oeuvre. Is that how you pronounce that name, that word?

 

Henry Jenkins:

Yeah, sure.

 

Ioana Literat:

And having to make sense of it was a really reflective, introspective moment. And so I realized that everything really has been about voice. And that voice that collectively and individually we didn't have growing up, and how that was so much tied to media and the way that media can both give you a voice and also silence you. And so now I'm looking for opportunities to both understand that better and also enable that voice.

 

Henry Jenkins:

Yeah, I think in my case, my politics did grow out of my fandom. I was growing up in a segregated neighborhood in the south. Schools are segregated, churches are segregated, no black people live there. I was surrounded by a lot of white supremacist thinking, not harsh, but definitely white supremacist thinking. But I saw two pathways forward on TV. One was Star Trek with its multicultural, multiracial crew, and the other was the speeches of Martin Luther King. And they both came to me via my television. And they both, as I hit a certain age of political consciousness, shaped how I saw the world in profound ways.

So I can't talk about politics without fandom and I can't talk about fandom without politics. And I recently was helping out with the Harris campaign, a group called the Schlatt Foundation, which is created by Sarah Silverman. And it's a bunch of comedians who made videos to support Harris, but also ran the Heroes For Harris Zoom event, which raised something like $80,000 through the campaign and brought together stars from films like Lord of the Rings and Princess Bride and The Hulk and so forth, with real world heroes. And it was an incredible event, but it was billed as a Comic-Con for Kamala.

So the idea that fandom could be the central part of one's identity politics was very much being staged by this event that I helped to plan and spoke at. And I was just so excited to see that in direct connection between fan activism, which is normally excluded from serious political spaces and campaigns for president. I don't think that's the reason she lost, but we made our own contributions.

 

Haeny Yoon:

That's a really good point. I'm thinking about how Kamala HQ was so, and all the supporting members of her fan community, you just outlined, Henry, we're very successful on social media. They really mobilized excitement. It really seemed like they were going to win because they were winning on social media.

 

Henry Jenkins:

Totally. I got swept up in it. I thought until about 8:00 P.M. that night that she was still going to win. But I obviously guessed it wrong. But the spirit of it was so strong.

 

Nathan Holbert:

I thought about including, what is it, the KHive on my list. But, honestly, the wound is still too raw for me to do that.

 

Haeny Yoon:

I think the reason why I brought that up is because I think that related to that, then I think there is also this dark side of the internet and social media that...

 

Nathan Holbert:

And fan communities.

 

Haeny Yoon:

Right. That I did not actually see or have access to because my TikTok algorithm is already like, I'm only going to show you Swiftie stuff and Kamala HQ and the Daily Show. So I'm like, "Oh, these people are all with me." So I wonder if either of you can comment on just some of the risks and problematic aspects that might happen on social media as well, and how you approach that and how we can balance those two perspectives. It's a really big question, but I'm sure something that a lot of us are interested in.

 

Henry Jenkins:

Yeah. Well, we could use, look at QAnon as a number of writers and fandom studies has as a fandom that went amok.

 

Nathan Holbert:

Yeah.

 

Henry Jenkins:

It starts with, my theory is that there's a group called the Wu Ming Collective in Italy that wrote a book called Q, And the book is about someone close to the king who was leaking messages to the people in order to overthrow an autocratic regime. So that may have been the starting point for us. 4 Jan and 8 Jan pumped it up in their desire for mischief. Troll culture, as Whitney Phillips calls it. And then they sent messages out, they were cryptic, and groups of people are decoding them through blogs and video blogs, and it moves to physical action in the real world involving a hefty amount of cosplay. If you look at someone like the QAnon Shaman who was involved in Jan 6. And finally direct action, whether it's trying to blast up a pizza gallery that you've been convinced is running a pedophilia ring or whether it's storming the capitol because you become convinced that Trump was being treated unfairly. We're seeing a goal emerge from a set of activities that are the same activities we as fans often engage with.

And so I have to say it's participatory culture as much as I hate to say it, but it shows us how participatory culture is not always positive, not always grueling, not always playful, but I don't think QAnon is any of those things. But the same mechanisms can result in very serious destructive and antisocial behavior. Whether it's the creation of conspiracy theories, which are a kind of fan fiction or the assemblage of data and data interpretation that is very fanboy-ish behavior or mastery over the canon. All of that contributes to a fandom that is now a serious threat to democracy.

 

Haeny Yoon:

And Ioana, your work explores that with young people. So now we're in a state where it's not just adults who join these fandoms and who want to overthrow governments and institutions, but now we're talking about young people. So how do you think about those, too?

 

Ioana Literat:

We really had to think about how to address that in our book too, because I am an optimist at heart. My collaborator, Netta, who is also one of Henry Jenkins' advisers. Fandom, exactly. We are optimistic. We couldn't do this work if we are not, to a very large extent, cautiously optimistic. I think we need optimism to keep going, to fuel our research. But then we don't want to over-idealize youth online participation either. And that's often a trap really, in which we fall. And when we do talk about these negative sides or this toxic behavior, we talk about it as happening to kids or to young people rather than being perpetrated by them. So then how do you deal with that. That sometimes they're not just at the receiving end, which is bad, but they're also the ones doing it, which is also very bad and concerning.

For me, going back to our theme of fandom, I think that it really, even just participating in this silly communities on reality TV communities on Reddit, really helps me understand this better. So I say I bracket it up from my research, but it does help me understand the good, the bad, and the ugly of these online communities. I get to see political consciousness and political socialization happening in apolitical spaces, which is a big reason why we're here. It explains what Henry was talking about. I get to see how media literacy forms and plays out. I get to see the role of humor and silliness in that. And then I also get to see how communities make and inform their own rules and their own norms. And I'm reminded of one of Henry's old interviews. And not that old, pretty recent actually, where he was talking about this dark side of participation. And I remember, Henry, that you went back to this idea of norms. And that the norms in a community are really what can keep things in check or let things go wild.

 

Henry Jenkins:

Yeah. We thought initially when the internet was coming and being, and I was observer from MIT, that it would be norm-based and people with communities would develop norms and enforce norms that ensured behavior. And you can go back to this great essay by Julian Dibbell, A Rape In Cyberspace, where someone gets thrown out of a game community for antisocial behavior. But what happened is the internet grew so fast that the possibilities for socialization in most communities were very limited.

The newbies always were outstretching the ability of the veterans to explain their culture. And so the cultures were constantly destabilized. So many communities emerged at once that it was possible to just hop from one to the next and not have a reputation that followed with you for mischief controlling and so forth. And most people don't live just in one community. So norms have to be system-wide, not community-wide when we're talking about the internet. And I think all of that has resulted with the commercial pressure, spreading heat and getting things that draw people back and keep them line a long time, have resulted in a very anti-social, social media.

 

Haeny Yoon:

Yeah, and I think what's important about both of your work too is that you talk about the dark side, but also talk about the bright side, of all these spaces, because I think the default lately has been to ban it or regulate it or shut it down without, what you both said, is creating the conditions or norms for participation.

 

Nathan Holbert:

To Ioana's point about agency too. Even this here, it's being done to kids, and so how do we stop it? Well, we shut it down and we do that to kids in an effort to protect them, as opposed to thinking about the agency that kids have in this space, both positive and negative.

 

Haeny Yoon:

We like to close our session with a regular segment that we have called What's Poppin', which is something in the landscape, the pop culture landscape that's exciting you right now, that you feel like other people should get into or maybe interested in. It could be book, media, television, toy, artifacts, something that's intriguing.

 

Nathan Holbert:

What's poppin' for you guys?

 

Ioana Literat:

I have quite a little one, and you already hinted at it, so now I have to say it. Yes, I've been into ballooning recently. Balloon twisting, whatever you want to call it.

 

Nathan Holbert:

Balloon art?

 

Ioana Literat:

Yeah, balloon art. But it is a really interesting form of media making. I do consider it a form of media making. It's creative, it's telling a story, it's using materials in an expressive way. And again, I've been in a really introspective stage, so trying to ask myself what drew me to it or why I really enjoy it. I think I like the ephemerality of it. I like the materiality of it. I feel in academia, I don't know, there's a pressure to really come up with things that are lasting and abstract and the opposite of balloon art.

 

Haeny Yoon:

You could pop that sucker right away.

 

Ioana Literat:

And the stakes are low. If it pops, you have another one. I love that you need a little bit of imagination to fill in the blanks. Again, I do a little twist and I go, that's a dog. It doesn't really look like a dog. You need to work a little bit to make that be a dog. And I like the joy that it brings.

 

Nathan Holbert:

Henry, what about you? For you, what's poppin' for you? What are you into? You mentioned the POP MART. What else?

 

Henry Jenkins:

So many things, but I've always got a lot of things going. I will start with a specific. I went to see Blitz on Friday night, this new Sir Steve McQueen film about a kid who gets lost in London during the firebombing of the city in World War II. And it's like going on a time machine. It's such a full densely realized representation of a time and place.

And utterly convincing. So part one is just a time machine. This oddity of traveling through this space on the back of a kid, essentially. And the second, I guess, is that it brings to foreground Black experiences. And because it's a mixed race kid, we are seeing parts of London that would not have been represented in the classic myth. So we have all of the British women painting the stockings on the backs of their legs and a lot of the things we've seen and known about for a long time.

But we also see the Jamaican community in London and how they're dealing. And we see some of the racism that affected where you hid out, what shelters you could go to, and so forth. So I thought it was such a densely realized and interesting film. Now, I guess if I were to go beyond the specific, I would say my fascination is what we call the global shuffle.

 

Haeny Yoon:

What's that?

 

Henry Jenkins:

An agree to which Netflix and other networks are giving us access to television from elsewhere in the world, whether it's Korean K-dramas, or whether it's Egyptian versions of X-Files or Scandinavian series about Vikings or whatnot.

 

Haeny Yoon:

There's an Egyptian version of X-Files?

 

Henry Jenkins:

We just expanded so much what television is compared to the limited English language thing we saw. And when I grew up, and according to the most recent statistics, 40% of time spent in America on Netflix is in programming other than English language. So that's a mix...

 

Nathan Holbert:

That's wild.

 

Henry Jenkins:

... of immigrants and fans all watching shows from somewhere else. That's a fascinating phenomenon to me. And something I really personally just enjoy, trying things out.

 

Haeny Yoon:

That's very true. Because I only watched K-dramas and Netflix because it reminds me of being at home and my parents forcing me to watch them on TV. So it's like never. And then I would come at home and look at Netflix and I'm like, "Oh, I like this."

 

Nathan Holbert:

That's awesome. We'll have to check all that stuff out. Well, thank you very much, Henry. Thank you very much, Ioana, for joining us today. It's been really, really great talking to you guys about fandom, about online spaces, communities, really great conversation.

 

Haeny Yoon:

And balloons.

 

Nathan Holbert:

And balloons.

 

Ioana Literat:

It's been a pleasure being here. And so great to see you again, Henry.

 

Henry Jenkins:

Likewise.

 

Nathan Holbert:

All right, thanks team.

 

Ioana Literat:

Thank you so much everybody.

 

Nathan Holbert:

Bye.

 

Henry Jenkins:

Bye.

 

Haeny Yoon:

Bye.

Pop And Play is produced by Haeny Yoon, Nathan Holbert, Lalitha Vasudevan, Billy Collins, and Joe Riina-Ferrie at Teachers College, Columbia University with the Digital Futures Institute.

 

Nathan Holbert:

Audio recordings for this episode by Abu Abdelbagi.

 

Haeny Yoon:

This episode was edited by Billy Collins and Adrienne Vitullo.

 

Nathan Holbert:

For a transcript and to learn more, visit tc.edu/popandplay. Our music is selections from Leaf Eaters by Podington Bear used here under a creative commons attribution non-commercial license. Blake Danzig and Meier Clark provided our social media and outreach support. Follow @popandplaypod on Instagram. Thank you to Abu Abdelbagi for support with our website and additional materials.

 

Haeny Yoon:

Do you teach about play and pop culture? Check out our topics collection, organized for the classroom. And of course, don't forget to share Pop And Play with a friend or colleague.

 

Nathan Holbert:

And thanks for listening.